Why develop your own taste when you can trust mine?

Main menu

Tag Archives: grapefruit

Tell me if you’ve seen this movie before, four people who have been friends since college, and who have drifted further and further away from each other over the years but still keep in touch, decide to take a trip together to a festival in New Orleans to reunite and blow off some steam. The “leader” of the foursome is successful in both career and marriage and writes self help books on how you too can have it all, the leader had a falling out with the one who had success as a journalist and who now has to pay bills with a celebrity scandal blog, one of the four is a parent, straight-laced, and is uncomfortable with the whole situation, and the final of the foursome is a partier and instigator constantly getting into trouble but is incredibly loyal to the group. It’s an overly familiar plot with overly familiar archetypes, except this time, the cast is made up entirely of African American women.

The four actresses playing these women are Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Tiffany Haddish, and the chemistry between the four is fantastic. It’s not just believable that these four have been friends since college, it seems like practically a given. The actual performances are a bit of a mixed bag, with Queen Latifah’s being the best of the lot, but the writing is actually top notch for this type of story so this adds some nuance and realism to the foursome and to those who surround them that the performances might otherwise not.

This script is the reason to see Girls Trip, and is also the reason that it stands among the best of this sort of film alongside movies like The Hangover and Bridesmaids. For, while all of the characters are an archetype, in addition to those listed above we also have the cheating spouse, the booking agent who seems a bit too friendly, and the old crush from high school, none of them are stereotypes. The cheating husband, for instance, is always respectful, never loses his cool, and actually has an understandable, if not forgivable, reason for cheating. He’s not just an asshole philanderer. The straight laced character does let loose on the trip, but only once and afterward she does loosen up a bit, but doesn’t transform into a different person. This honesty of character can be seen in everybody on screen, making those in the story relatable not just because we recognize a type, but because they act like and have the motivations of real people, not over the top caricatures.

Most importantly, though, the humor in this movie really hits. I am not the target audience for Girls Trip, and I was laughing so hard I had to wipe the tears from the corners of my eyes when the lights in the theater came up. This may have been because laughter is contagious, for I did see the film with the target demographic – I was the only white male in the entire movie theater, and of the women in the theater only a handful were white – and everyone else was in hysterics to the point where I couldn’t hear the final lines of quite a few scenes, but I know that couldn’t have been the entirety of the reason for the laughter. While the actors in the film may not have been the most subtle when it comes to the portrayal of their characters, they know funny, particularly Tiffany Haddish and Jada Pinkett Smith who steal every comic scene they are in, which is the majority of them.

Final verdict:Girls Trip may not contain anything we haven’t seen many times before, hell we had Rough Night just last month, but it does the best that can be done with its too familiar pretense. You could probably summarize the plot from beginning to end without seeing the film, and I’d bet you could get pretty close to the real thing, and yet, this is still a movie worth seeing. These four ladies are hilarious, the writing they are given to work with has a lot more realism then most films of this type, and the subplot surrounding Queen Latifah’s Sasha Franklin may be the most fascinating I’ve seen in a debauchery focused plot. Girls Trip may not need to be seen in the theaters to be enjoyed, though my audience certainly made my experience better, but it should be one to keep an eye out for when you get a chance.

And, Hollywood, take note. I saw three films this weekend at three different theaters, with Girls Trip being the third, and in every single case the lobby of each theater was as crowded as I had ever seen them and 95% of the people in each of those theaters were African American women. This is not a film you would expect to draw gigantic crowds for, and yet there they were. You have an audience starving for some attention and representation on screen. When I did research for an article on racism in Hollywood which I have not yet published, I found that less than 1% of leading roles in Hollywood are portrayed by African American women, or women of any other minority for that matter, and that is criminal. Love of film is something that can unite us all, but we love it most when we see someone who is a stand in for ourselves, and minority women get that stand in so far, far too rarely. Sit up, take notice of the box office for Girls Trip on its opening weekend, and do the right thing, which also happens to be a profitable thing. Win-win.